In a recent Wall Street Journal article Heather Mac Donald, of the conservative think-tank “The Manhattan Institute”, claims that poverty, racism, and social injustice are not root-causes of crime. Mac Donald argues that under conventional left-wing wisdom, crime should be increasing due to the current economic recession. Mac Donald cites 2009 FBI crime statistics that reportedly show national decreases in crime. She writes, “The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice.”

Mac Donald criticizes government social service programs, including “after-school programs, social workers, and summer jobs”, suggesting that they are not effective in decreasing crime.

Is Mac Donald’s analysis too simplistic? Does a decrease in some crimes really demonstrate that crime is not linked to poverty, race, or social injustice? Even if one were to accept Mac Donald’s arguments, is it really better for individuals and society for the government to eliminate needed social service programs?

According to a comprehensive Rutgers-Columbia study published on line in Health Affairs, children on Medicaid are four times as likely to be prescribed anti-psychotic drugs as compared to their counterparts who have private health insurance. In Poor children likelier to get antipsychotic drugs, New York Times reporter Duff Wilson opines that the release of this study will fuel the debate about whether poor children deemed to have emotional or behavioral problems are prescribed drugs, whether medically appropriate or not, simply because it is a cheaper course of treatment than counseling or therapy. The Times piece describes the side effects of such drugs which include drastic weight gain and other metabolic problems that can be life long.

Not surprisingly, recent national statistics on race and Medicaid usage compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation indicate that blacks and Latinos are disproportionately represented among Medicaid users. Based on the growing body of social science analysis and literature regarding implicit bias and the tendency of educators and others to respond to the behavior of children of color more punitively, addressing the stark disparity revealed by the Rutgers-Columbia study seems imperative to the future health and well being of our nation’s children.

In a recent article, Teaching Tolerance, a Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, explores the impact of school teachers’ treatment of race on the academic achievement of their students of color. The article concludes teachers may detrimentally affect their students of color when they engage in “colorblindness,” i.e., ignoring or overlooking racial and ethnic differences to promote racial harmony.

Approximately 2.8 million students will graduate from US High Schools this year. Some will go on to college; others will join the military or take another path in life. But they will get the opportunity to test their dreams and live their American story. However, a group of about 65,000 students a year will not have this opportunity because they bear the inherited title of undocumented immigrant. These highly motivated individuals have lived in the United States all their lives and want nothing more than to be recognized as American citizens.

The DREAM Act introduced by Senators Richard Durbin of Illinois and Richard Lugar of Indiana and Rep. Howard Berman of California and Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida? can solve this growing problem. Under the rigorous provisions of the DREAM Act, undocumented young people could be eligible for a conditional path to citizenship in exchange for a mandatory two years in higher education or military service. Undocumented young people must also demonstrate good moral character to be eligible for and stay in conditional residency. At the end of the long process, the young person can have the chance to become an American citizen. The DREAM Act Portal works to turn this dream into a reality.  Courtesy of the Dream Act Portal.

A new book argues that helping undocumented immigrants attend college also makes economic sense.

In the book “We ARE Americans,” Professor William Perez tells the stories of 20 young people, all of them children of illegal immigrants, and all of them striving to go to college. They are just a handful of the 65,000 kids who graduate from American high schools each year, kids who remain undocumented.

After graduation, they hit a wall. Their status means they can’t get jobs legally or financial aid for college. We’ll hear from William Perez in a moment, but first, to one of the young people he profiled, Nora Preciado, known in the book as Jessica.

Preciado and her parents crossed the border from Mexico when she was just 13 years old. She’s now 32, an American citizen, and an immigration lawyer. But throughout her school years, Preciado says she felt like she lived in the shadows of America.

Dave Eggers is the author of such books as “What is the What” and “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”   He was the 2008 TED Prize winner. TED is a non-profit devoted to Ideas Worth Sharing.  In accepting his 2008 TED Prize, Dave Eggers asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center.  The 826  tutoring center is a unique space for children to re-imagine themselves as swash buckling pirates while improving on their basic reading and writing skills.  What started off as a simple idea that children would benefit from one on one attention has spawned similar themed tutoring centers from Los Angeles to Brooklyn.

The San Francisco Chronicle provided an update in an article today on a case involving minority residents of Section 8 housing in Antioch, California, that was first written up by the Race Equity Project E-Newsletter a year ago.  The subject of E-Newsletter 3.6 was the intersection of criminal law, race, and poverty law practice.  The specific case was described in the article titled, “Targeted Enforcement of Section 8 Participants in Antioch.”  The case, brought by Bay Area Legal Aid and Public Advocates, Inc. on behalf of primarily African-American Section 8 tenants in the city of Antioch, alleged that the City’s special police enforcement division, called, the “Community Action Team” (CAT), had systematically targeted Section 8 tenants for police enforcement (“over-policing”) in an effort to drive those tenants out of Antioch and, in so doing, had violated those tenants’ civil rights.

The SF Chronicle reports that criminologist Barry Krisberg’s recent study confirmed that “Antioch’s police Community Action Team … has disproportionately concentrated on subsidized Section 8 housing for the poor, and even more so on black tenants.”

The CAT website says that the CAT’s goal is to protect the right it asserts Antioch residents have “to feel safe in their homes and neighborhoods…“  The purported right to be free from fear has yet to be codified in California law.  Based on what Social Cognition science tells us about how our mind’s implicit associations are primed to be unconsciously fearful of, especially, people of African descent by such things as watching the local evening news (see Jerry Kang’s article, “Trojan Horses of Race“), residents of Antioch, Section 8 tenants included, are likely caught in a vicious cycle of unfounded fears confirmed, in many of their minds, by the experience and reporting of targeted enforcement of low-income, African-American households.  Maybe what is needed, at least in part, is some anti-bias training for fearful residents of Antioch and its police officers in order to raise the impact of unconcious biases to the conscious level where they may be dealt with openly and Constitutionally.

The Poverty & Race Research Action Council has just published Connecting Families to Opportunity: A Resource Guide for Housing Choice Voucher Administrators. The guide surveys the best practices for supporting families that choose to move with a voucher to a higher opportunity neighborhood, stressing the importance of supportive services and systems to help families connect to the better health, education and employment opportunities such neighborhoods usually offer. One highlighted best practice is Dallas-based Inclusive Communities Project’s Mobility Assistance Program (MAP). MAP counselors encourage families to consider schools when choosing where to live arming the families with school ratings, offers school enrollment assistance, and provides support to enable enrolled children to participate in extracurricular activities. The hope is that this guide will instruct housing authorities around the country to adopt similarly supportive programs to ensure that more families will put down roots in opportunity neighborhoods to the betterment of the families’ health, well being and financial stability and success.

When Lori Phanachone, a Laotian American teenager born in California, told officials at her new Iowa high school that a language other than English was spoken in her home, she was categorized as an “English Language Learner” and forced to take a basic English proficiency exam.  She passed the test as a sophomore, and felt the requirement to take it again the following year was insulting.

Despite her 3.9 GPA, school officials said she was “illiterate” because she refused to continue taking the English Language Development Assessment (ELDA). They called Phanachone’s refusal “insubordination” and suspended her for three days.

The plot thickens, however – it appears that the high school may have misused Panachone’s indication of Lao as the primary language spoken in her home in order to obtain extra federal funds available for students determined to have limited English proficiency.  “[The school] labeled me an English Language Learner when I enrolled without even bothering to test me. All I want is to continue my education without the school labeling me unfairly,” said Phanachone.

See the full story here on Colorlines.com.

Derek W. Black, In Defense Of Voluntary Desegregation: All Things Are Not Equal, 44 Wake Forest L. Rev. 107 (2009).

• Summary: “This Article analyzes the concept of racial stigma in Justice Kennedy’s controlling opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1… [and] reveals that Kennedy’s fundamental concern is that using racial classifications to achieve voluntary desegregation racially stigmatizes students. In particular, he assumes that the classifications undermine individualism and reduce children to “racial chits.”” The Article proceeds to analyze Kennedy’s position and elucidate how Kennedy’s opinion “fails… to recognize the purpose of voluntary desegregation and the unique characteristics that distinguish it from other race-conscious programs.”

Ronald Roach from Diverse Online published an interesting story last Thursday, indicating that American law schools have been admitting fewer African-American and Mexican American students despite an increase in capacity over the last 15 years. According to research done by Conrad Johnson, director of the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic at the Columbia University Law School, in 1992, “there were 176 accredited U.S. law schools and by 2006 that total had increased to 195 accredited schools, offering a gain of nearly 4,000 first-year seats for law school students,” yet at the same time, “while African-American and Mexican American applicants have endured falling admissions rates, their undergraduate grade point averages and Law School Admission Test scores have improved during the same period.”

John Nussbaumer, associate dean of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School echoes Professor Johnson’s comments regrading the disproportionate acceptance rateof minority group applications, noting that “from 2002 to 2007, 62 percent of African-American and 4 percent of Mexican American applicants to law school failed to gain admission to any ABA-approved institution, while just 34 percent of 363,360 White applicants were turned away from all the schools to which they applied.”

Both Nussbaumer and Johnson agree that this problem stems from an overreliance on LSAT scores by admissions committees in the application process, “this overreliance and trend has played out in a number of ways. One is the decrease of inclusivity of African-Americans and Mexican Americans and that’s reflected in their numbers and percentages within entering classes but also in the shut-out rates as you compare different ethnic groups.” However, law schools such as Thomas M. Cooley have faced pressure from the ABA accreditation committee to limit the number of lower-tier LSAT scores taken into consideration during the applications process. Furthermore, opponents of diversity initiatives and affirmative action have argued that affirmative action policies harm, rather than help minority groups in the long run.

The recent posting on the Stanford study regarding the phenomenon known as stereotype threat and its role in California Exit Exam passage rates for young women and people of color generated significant traffic on this blog. For more on this subject, we suggest reading Stereotype threat widens achievement gap, a 2006 article in the American Psychological Association’s web-based compendium Psychology Matters (PM). The short piece focuses on the work of leading psychologists in this area, including Claude Steele, PhD. In a groundbreaking study done in 1995, Steele and Joshua Aronson, PhD, gave African-American and White college students with comparable SAT scores a half-hour test using difficult items from the verbal Graduate Record Exam (GRE). In the stereotype-threat condition, the researchers told students the test diagnosed intellectual ability, potentially eliciting the stereotype that African-Americans are less intelligent than Whites. In the no-stereotype-threat condition, the researchers told students that the test was merely a problem-solving lab task. Under the stereotype threat condition, African-Americans did less well than Whites. In the no-threat condition—the two racial groups performed equally. In a comparable experiment, Steele and other researchers tested women’s math test-taking performance with similar results.

The PM piece includes a reading list of journal articles on the studies described above and several more, including Improving adolescents’ standardized test performance: An intervention to reduce the effects of stereotype threat, a study co-conducted by Aronson that offers potential remedies to stereotype threat in standardized testing in middle-school students (e.g. pre-test mentoring by college students on the malleable nature of intelligence).

Regarding the body of research of stereotype threat over the last 15 years, the PM article concludes “the threat appears to be sufficiently influential to be heeded by teachers, students, researchers, policymakers and parents” and that “[a]t the very least, the findings undercut the tendency to lay the blame on unsupported genetic and cultural factors, such as whether African Americans ‘value’ education or girls can’t do math.”

The Sacramento Bee posted two articles today, Dan Walters: Stanford study of exit exam shows fallacy and Some graduation rates worse with high school exit exam, on how the California High School Exit Exam instituted in 2006 has a disproportionate effect on graduation rates of minorities and young women. These findings are based on a study by the Institute for Research on Education Policy & Practice at Stanford University (IREPP) , “the Stanford study looked at graduation rates for students who stayed in school all four years – both before and after California initiated the exit exam. Since the test became a requirement, the study found, a disproportionate number of those who didn’t graduate because of the test are minorities and girls.” Interestingly, the study attributes these findings to what the IREPP researches call the “stereotype threat.” Essentially, this threat is defined as the extra stress on nonwhite and female students to do well on these exams, so as not to confirm negative stereotypes about their group.

The California Dropout Research Project,  a project based at the the UC Santa Barbara Gevitz School of Education, recently released a report that indicates Californian Latino and Black high school students graduate with alarmingly low numbers when compared to Asian and White students.

“Graduation rates for African American and Hispanic students are much lower at 60%, or more than 20 percentage points below the rate for Asian and White students.” In case you dislike data without proposed solutions, the California Dropout Research Project released a guide entitled Solving California’s Drop Crisis in 2008.

Dr. john a. powell of Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity has hypothesized that the structural inequities we observe around us in everyday American life play a large role the development of our unconscious biases, which, in turn, contribute to the perpetuation of those structural (and material) inequities.  If true, while daunting, there may be a way out of this insidious cycle one step at a time.

In a pre-Inauguration, Washington Post article, then-President-Elect Obama was quoted as saying:

“There is an entire generation that will grow up taking for granted that the highest office in the land is filled by an African American… I mean, that’s a radical thing. It changes how black children look at themselves. It also changes how white children look at black children.”

Some researchers have described this possible change in an entire nation’s implicit racial attitudes as “the Obama effect” and suggest President Obama may be right about his ability, through his high-profile status, to “lift” unconsciously-held stereotypes.  As Sam Dillon’s New York Times article recounts, university social psychologists have conducted an experiment that suggests that the inspiring role model that Obama projects may help African-American test-takers overcome implicit associations between their own race and stereotypes about their ability to test well, which had been shown to negatively affect test-taking performance in earlier research, and actually improve test-taking performance.

We will be watching closely to see whether researchers can replicate these findings and in what other areas of life a similar positive “stereotype lifting” effect may manifest.

Introduction

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”) is meant to ensure that schools provide disabled students with the services they need to progress educationally. IDEA is rightfully hailed for providing comprehensive educational rights to millions of children previously neglected by the public education system. But from the perspective of situationism, IDEA is a disaster, particularly in addressing the needs of low-income, minority children from limited English proficiency (“LEP”) homes.

Situationism seeks to base law and policymaking on realist models of human action. To achieve this end, it draws on cognitive psychology, social psychology, behavioral neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and related fields. Situationism stands in opposition to non-realist models of human action, particularly dispositionist models, such as the rational actor so beloved by law and economics. The key situationist insight is that while it may appear that our dispositions (personality, attitude, preferences, character, free choices) determine our actions, in truth, our actions are ruled largely by our situations (environmental factors and sub-conscious mental & physical processes).

The Situation of IDEA

Education advocates know well the typical trajectory for LEP kids under IDEA. These children are generally identified as eligible for special education services later than children from English-proficient homes, for schools do not rigorously distinguish academic deficiencies due to disabilities from deficiencies due to limited English proficiency. Once LEP children are identified, their parents consent to limited assessments, simplistic goals, and inexpensive services because of their trust in school personnel. Only after years pass, as the children fall further and further behind their peers, do their parents seek out an advocate for help.

The situation established by IDEA virtually guarantees this outcome for the following reasons:

• IDEA requires schools to provide children the services they need in order to achieve “educational benefit” – generally speaking, progress towards individualized educational program (“IEP”) goals – without adequately reimbursing the schools for those services. Administrators and staff at cash-strapped schools may be dispositionally inclined to help disabled children, but absent funding, they have little situational incentive to properly assess children’s needs, to set challenging goals, or to seek out and provide the services they would need to meet such goals.

• IDEA posits a uniform “parent” able to take advantage of a broad array of rights under the law. In reality, LEP parents are subject to a wide variety of situational forces that diminish their ability to take advantage of these rights:

• Those who are illegal immigrants are, as a situational matter, terrified of invoking legal rights and procedures for fear of drawing attention to themselves and thereby increasing their risk of deportation.

• LEP parents are unable to meaningfully participate in IEP meetings in which school staff provide spoken translation. Staffers will generally translate the group’s conclusions, but not the side discussion that often occurs between team members. Moreover, while parents have the legal right to written translations of IEPs and assessment results, schools are under no legal obligation to inform parents of this right.

• In single-parent homes or in homes with two working parents, it is difficult to make time to learn about children’s rights, or to network with other parents or with disability rights organizations.

• Parents with limited education often trust those with more education and who present themselves as authority figures. Tragically, as system justification theory shows, members of disadvantaged groups regularly internalize perceptions of themselves as social inferiors, are reluctant to challenge the social order, and patiently accept inadequate outcomes. All of these tendencies lead to years of inadequate special education.

• School personnel who participate in IEP teams fall victim to groupthink: they seek consensus rather than airing objections and doubts, they fail to consider outside information and opinions that might contradict the group consensus, and they come to consider loyalty to the group and its consensus as the moral course of action. As Irving Janis, the psychologist who pioneered the study of groupthink, wrote, “Each member is likely to become more dependent than ever on the in-group for maintaining his self-image as a decent human being and will therefore be more strongly motivated to maintain group unity.” For a staffer to admit that a child is not progressing or to consult outside experts for assessments or services is to act immorally and betray the group, all at cost to his or her self-image.

• IDEA is a highly procedural law, exacting in its specification of what must be done to develop an IEP, who must participate, and the timeframes in which each step must be taken. An IEP developed according to these procedures gains procedural legitimacy: because the IEP is the outcome of these rigorous procedures, schools (not to mention administrative hearing officers and judges) presume it to be fair, even in the face of evidence that the child is not progressing. Moreover, much research shows that people view the fairness of procedures as trumping the fairness of outcomes.

• While IDEA gives parents rights to an independent educational evaluation and to a due process hearing, schools often view parents who asserts these rights as dispositionally selfish (i.e., as rational actors freely choosing to privilege their children’s needs over those of the school) rather than as situationally motivated (i.e., as human animals subject to a genetic compulsion to protect their offspring). The IEP team may also view these rights as procedurally illegitimate: invoking them brings in outside opinions and thereby calls into question the morality of group consensus, and also privileges outcomes over procedures. Just as schools view parents who assert their rights as selfish, parents come to view school staff as incompetent, uncaring, or even malicious (rather than as humans seeking procedural legitimacy and subject to economic constraints and groupthink). In taking these stances, both sides make what social psychologists describe as the fundamental attribution error: the human tendency to attribute others’ behavior to their dispositions rather their situations.

What is to be Done?

An obvious solution to this problem would be for federal and state governments (i) to prescribe rigorous assessment for disabilities of all children entering the school system, (ii) to specify exactly what services each disability merits, and (iii) to fully reimburse school districts for the costs of these assessments and services. Such a system would remove nearly all of the situational barriers to children receiving effective services in early childhood, when they are most effective.

Until that day comes, advocates for LEP children are advised to adopt a situationist perspective:

• Attempt to level the linguistic playing field. First, have someone from your office translate for the parent at IEP meetings. Even if you are bilingual, it is ideal to bring someone else so that you can be free to negotiate on behalf of the parent, and save precious time. Request that all written documents produced by the IEP team be translated into the parent’s native language.

• Encourage parents to assert their rights under IDEA (i.e., fight parents’ tendency towards system justification) and discourage them from expressing unwarranted anger or hostility towards school personnel (i.e., remind parents not to make the fundamental attribution error). It will take years for even the perfect IEP to be implemented if the school hates the family and is determined to stonewall on delivery of services.

• In your dealings with the school (and if need be, with administrative hearing officers and the courts), stress the procedural legitimacy of seeking an independent educational evaluation and a due process hearing.

• Resign yourself to groupthink, but use independent educational evaluations and due process as means to route around it. An IEP team will likely never admit that it has spent years signing off on inadequate IEPs; do what is necessary to stop the hearing officer from identifying with the IEP team so that she or she will look at the child’s circumstances with fresh eyes.

This article was authored by Jith Meganathan, Staff Attorney, Central California Legal Services.

As you watch The University of Kansas take on The University of Memphis tonight at 6:21p.m. (US/Western) on CBS for the 2008 NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship keep in mind that the respective universities, and many others, are failing their student-athletes.

The University of North Carolina is the only school among the final four teams to graduate at least half of its players. The other top seeds graduation rates are an embarrassment: 45 percent at Kansas and 40 percent at UCLA and Memphis.

Race matters in this issue, reflected in the gaps between graduation rates for white and African-American student-athletes. 34 percent of the tournament teams have a 30-point or greater difference in graduation success between black and white players. Schools of higher education promise their student-athletes a meaningful education but have failed to meet those promises.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP) announce the release of Still Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration; A Manual for Parents, Educators and Advocates. The Manual provides valuable guidance and information about how communities and school districts can promote racial diversity and address racial isolation in schools nationwide. This Second Edition of the Manual is being issued on the heels of the Supreme Court’s June 2007 decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, which limited the ability of school districts to take race into account in achieving these goals.

This is a critical time on the ground. School districts and communities around the country are struggling to determine how to continue their voluntary integration efforts within the bounds of the Court’s decision. In some instances, school districts have hastily modified or abandoned diversity programs without carefully considering the options that are still viable under the Court’s decision and taking proper account of the significant harms of racially segregated schools.

The Manual addresses the practical questions of what parents, advocates and educators can now do to promote diversity and address the harms of racial isolation in their schools. It provides accurate and up to date information and a step by step guide for how you can strengthen diversity and expand opportunity in your schools, including:

• The history of court-ordered desegregation efforts;
• The causes, patterns and devastating impact of the rapid resegregation currently occurring in America’s public schools;
• A comprehensive discussion of many demonstrated benefits of racially integrated schools and the harms of racially isolated schools;
• A detailed review of the Supreme Court’s Parents Involved decision;
• Brief description of the common methods of student assignment;
• Case studies of school districts with widely discussed approaches towards promoting high quality, inclusive schools

The Equal Justice Society and UCLA School of Law hosted a Symposium on the labor and employment impact of California’s anti-affirmative action law — Prop. 209. Several research papers were presented, including:

A Vision Fulfilled? The Impact of Proposition 209 on Equal Opportunity for Women Business Enterprises
Monique W. Morris, Michael D. Sumner, Jessica Z. Borja

Affirmative Action Programs and Business Ownership among Minorities and Women
Robert Fairlie, Justin Marion

Diversity Management in America and the Affirmative Action Debate in France
Christine Pauwels

The Effectiveness of Affirmative Action in Highway Procurement
Justin Marion

Free to Compete? Measuring the Impact of Proposition 209 on Minority Business Enterprises
Monique W. Morris, Sirithon Thanasombat, Michael D. Sumner, Sara Pierre, Jessica Z. Borja

The Impact of State Affirmative Procurement Policies on Minority- and Women- Owned Businesses in Five States
Tim Lohrentz

Minority Preferences In Public Contracts
Christopher M. Westhoff, Jess J. Gonzalez

Using Race or Ethnicity as Factors in Employee and Contractor Outreach
David Benjamin Oppenheimer

* * *
In related news, UCLA Professors Cheryl Harris and Walter Allen wrote an Op-Ed in the National Law Journal highlighting the flaws in the “mismatch thesis”, which purports to demonstrate empirically that “affirmative action in law schools hurts black law students because it puts them in schools where their credentials are below the median; consequently, they cannot academically compete.” Professors Harris and Allen note that the “mismatch thesis” has not been subject to peer review and numerous questions remain about the accuracy of the thesis.
The Equal Justice Society published a point-by-point response to Pr. Sander’s 2004 article, which appeared in the Stanford Law Review. Other responses can be found at http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/research.html.

On Sunday, the Associated Press reported on the current declining trend in African-American lawyers appearing before the Supreme Court. The article suggests several factors that may account for the growing paucity of minority lawyers at the nation’s highest court:

• continuing problems in recruiting and retaining blacks and other minorities at the top law firms;
• the rise of a small group of lawyers who focus on Supreme Court cases;
• the decline in civil rights cases that make it to the high court; and
• the court’s dwindling caseload.

No doubt, the loss of effective affirmative action policies at many law schools will exacerbate this trend.

Titled “Racist Incident Roils Pa. High School” the Associated Press article describes a part of the school parking lot where students wearing Confederate flags exclusively park their trucks at Warkwick High School, a mostly white, affluent school. Parents of students of color stated they made complaints about the hostile environment this created, but the school defended the actions as protected by the First Amendment. Not until racial slurs targeting the students of color came to the attention of staff did the school respond, and the response seems more motivated by rumors of threats of violence than acknowledgment that the school allowed a racist environment to exist. The Superintendent’s lack of response until this week was explained as such: “Perhaps we were lulled into a false sense that our school district was immune to racism and bigotry.” Unfortunately this is an example of the racial realist/colorblind paradigm that exists across the country, a false belief that the civil rights movement changed the minds of people to believe that the movement achieved equality amongst all people. The district’s response at the parent meeting was to blame the students for not coming forward as an excuse for the school’s failure to address the hostile school environment. See Jon Hanson, Kathleen Hanson, The Blame Frame: Justifying (Racial) Injustice In America, 41 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 413 (2006). Clearly, this story and many others from schools across our nation indicate that to this day, youth do not think whites and people of color are equal. Incidents like this and more violent displays of racism by young people should demonstrate to school administrators that by turning a blind eye, they have a hand in perpetuating racial hostility.

State Superintendent of the California Department of Education Jack O’Connell released the 2007 STAR results for California’s students on August 15, 2007. While there were some gains in the percentage of students scoring at advanced or proficient levels of English Language Arts and Math, what was apparent from the results was an achievement gap between White students and African American and Latino classmates regardless of whether they were from a low income household or not. Noteworthy in O’Connell’s news release is his recognition that the achievement may have to do more with race than poverty: “They are racial achievement gaps, and we cannot continue to excuse them.”

According to a July 15, 2007 New York Times article “School Diversity Based on Income Segregates Some,” the answer is unclear. After the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision the restricted race-based school assignments, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. I, 127 S.Ct. 2738 (2007), schools will need to look for other legal means to seek racial diversity. By using an income based plan, studies show that schools can achieve socioeconomic diversity, but not necessarily racial diversity. The plan could succeed in income and racial diversity if it aggressively shifts students around the district. However, this runs against many families’ choice not to have their child attend an out of neighborhood school. Therefore, like San Francisco schools, if a school plan does not mandate income desegregation and provide adequate transportation options, family choice will assert itself and resegregate the schools by race. From the REP perspective, we need to locate studies that connect racial and socioeconomic diversity in schools to academic success and opportunity in order to continue to pressure schools to seek equal access to a quality education for all students.

I was unclear about the severity of the segregation patterns that Seattle School District No. 1 (“District”) was trying to remedy after reading the Court’s recent opinion in Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. Given the Court’s summary factual account of the problem that gave rise to the District’s program, I wondered how severe the segregation patterns in the District were.

I decided to map the patterns of segregation existent in the District at the commencement of the suit. Take a look at the map for yourself (Click on the map image to view the map).

Note that the District’s program simply gave preference to students of color who requested to attend one of District’s “high demand schools.” Was the problem of segregation perhaps more severe than the Court’s statement of facts suggests? Could such marked patterns of segregation really be unconnected to our history of racial segregation? The REP would love to hear your thoughts.

• Filed under: Civil Rights, Data, Education, Mapping
• Comments Off